Word: sleater
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Corin Tucker, singer and guitarist for the great punk trio Sleater-Kinney, was talking about the night she crossed paths with the Backstreet Boys. "They were recording in the same studio. It was"--in a perfect mall-rat accent--"we're definitely meeting them. For sure. We met the one, I think his name is Kevin." She was asked whether the pop star treated her as if she were a besotted fan or another musician. "Well!" Tucker said. "Total besotted fan. He didn't see me as a musician at all. He doesn't know...
...Sleater-Kinney, composed of Tucker, 28, guitarist-singer Carrie Brownstein, 26, and drummer-singer Janet Weiss, 35, is a punk band because, among other reasons, a sense of exclusion and marginalization is part of what drives its music. That sense is a source of the vehemence in the trio's sound, which--on albums released on the small Pacific Northwest labels Chainsaw and Kill Rock Stars--has become at once bigger and more agile, harsher and more unpredictable, since the band formed in 1994 in Olympia, Wash. The world is organized so as not to have to listen to songs...
...radio, a Sleater-Kinney song throws everything around it off balance, the way a Smokey Robinson composition like The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage can make whatever might play before or after it seem stupid. "It can be thrilling and scary at the same time," Weiss says of hearing the band's music on the radio, which, on commercial stations, almost never happens. "To be involved in that--it's almost as if it's not real...
Five albums later, Sleater-Kinney (Sleater rhymes with crater) is out of storage. Village Voice critic Robert Christgau declares that "they could no more make a bad album than the Rolling Stones in 1967." Journalists routinely describe them as the world's greatest rock-'n'-roll band, a tag once reserved for the Stones. Big record labels have vainly courted them for years. Their new album, All Hands on the Bad One, contains some of the best songs of their career. For all the band's exposure on MTV's 120 Minutes and MTV2, Brownstein is in even heavier rotation...
Hard, for example, to imagine Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull putting on this week's Ladyfest, Olympia's six-day festival of female bands, artists and speakers, open to both sexes. Workshops range from guitar lessons to basic auto mechanics, "girls only." Besides Sleater-Kinney, other nationally known Olympia acts performing include Bangs (a blissful marriage of the Go-Gos and the Ramones), the Need, and the Gossip. The bands from out of town are also formidable (Cat Power, the Rondelles, Bratmobile), but it's no coincidence that it's happening here...